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PART ONE
THE HEBREW BIBLE: HISTORY AND GENERAL PROBLEMS
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1
INTRODUCTION TO THE HEBREW BIBLE
1. Description and definition of the material
(a) The term āIntroductionā, Greek eisagÅgÄ, Latin introductio, was used for the first time, as far as we know, by the Antiochene monk Hadrian, who died around 440. Nowadays it is used to denote that science which studies the biblical literature from a historical-critical and literary perspective; in this sense it appears at the end of the seventeenth century, from the works of the German scholar J.D. Michaelis on. It is now part of the current terminology of the faculties of theology and the arts.
In fact the concept is already present in a very early period and sometimes begins with the first drafting of the biblical text. The redactors, and more rarely the authors, of the texts already felt the need to prefix to the material in their collections certain observations which were meant to make it easier to understand, putting it in a proper historical and ideological context. So we have the superscriptions of the Psalms (which in modern translations are not always counted in the numbering of the verses, because of their redactional character): they try to relate the compositions in question to events and persons in the history of Israel or to particular liturgical situations. There are also superscriptions to some passages of the prophetic and wisdom books, superscriptions which usually seek to identify an author and sometimes a historical situation. Some of them may go back to the prophets themselves or their disciples, who will have collected them from the words of the master. A very well-known example of this is the beginning of Isa.6. 1: āIn the year in which king Uzziah died I saw the Lord . . . ā, i.e. around 742 or 736 BCE (the date is uncertain), even if in cases like this we have to take the possibility of pseudepigraphy (below, p.8) seriously into consideration. Other superscriptions in the prophetic and wisdom books, however, are clearly the work of redactors and therefore later; they can be recognized because they are independent of the context: for example the words with which the book of Jeremiah begins (1.1ff.).
These examples, though differing in quality, have in common the awareness that it is impossible to understand the attitude of persons and schools of thought, and therefore of the writings which derive from them, without knowing the events or the situations which shaped them wholly or in part. For example, ignorance of Canaanite religion would notably limit our understanding of the prophetic message, in continual struggle against religious syncretism; nor could we understand adequately the political or social message of biblical prophecy were we ignorant of the situation which moulded it.
So we find in the Hebrew Bible itself a number of what have rightly been called āintroductory notesā, some (and which these are is always controversial) perhaps going back directly or indirectly to the authors of the works, and others (the majority) introduced by the redactors to whom we also owe the final edition of the text. The latter in particular are fairly easy to recognize because they do not fit into the context.
Rabbinic literature continued along these lines, and sometimes we can derive introductory information from it which is important because it is based on trustworthy traditions; however, for the most part we have traditions which cannot be verified and sometimes are even improbable, governed by the demands of edification or catechesis and therefore irrelevant for the historical understanding of the passages to which they refer.
But the need for an introduction is not felt in the same way on all sides. There are those who, like the Israeli M. Weiss, think that the difficulties of identifying the original situation in which certain passages were composed are so great (and the controversial character of the results bears witness to this) that it a priori discourages the majority of research in this direction. He considers it more useful, and also more in keeping with the nature of the texts, to concentrate on the aesthetic and dramatic characteristics of the texts and their content. I hope that I shall succeed in demonstrating in the next paragraph why I do not feel able to share this position (moreover I have already alluded to the problem in the Preface, above, p. xi).
The need to interpret a literature in its particular historical, ideological and social context is not, moreover, peculiar to the biblical literature. It appears every time the readers (in this case our contemporaries) have no immediate and direct contact with the circumstances in which a certain type of literature came into being. That can happen for various reasons: geographical distance (for example, in the case of literature near to us in time but geographically remote and therefore remote in customs, institutions and language); it can also be caused by there being a considerable distance in time between the readers and the events narrated, though these events may have taken place in their geographical vicinity (for example in the West classical Latin and Greek literature, mediaeval literature and Renaissance literature). In the case of the Hebrew Bible and of all the literature of the ancient Near East we face a considerable distance on both the geographical and the chronological levels; modern readers, especially modern Western readers, come up against people (and therefore literatures, practices, institutions, mentalities) with which they have little or nothing in common. So it goes without saying that unless a reader has a remarkable and specialized education, he or she will be ignorant for the most part of the historical, political, economic, social, historical and religious facts to which the text refers. To this must be added the problem of the language, which most of the time is an insuperable obstacle to a direct knowledge of the sources. Finally, the biblical texts present a particular problem, since in the Hebrew Bible we have a work which for millennia has been, as it still is, the sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity, and therefore Western readers who have grown up in the sphere of the Jewish-Christian tradition have unconsciously assimilated a whole theological and ecclesiastical tradition which will not fail to make its own weight felt on the explanation of the texts. Centuries of exegesis which are far from lacking in preconceptions can impel readers, without their being aware of it, either towards the uncritical acceptance of certain non-proven statements, or paradoxically towards the equally uncritical rejection of certain positions simply because these positions have been traditionally held within the sphere of certain religious communities. The need for an introductory science which offers a critical view of the biblical literature should therefore be evident to anyone.
(b) I propose the following definition of the subject: We may term that discipline Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (or New Testament) which sets out to present, where possible, the information needed to identify the authors of a text, its literary genre, the milieu from which it derives, and so on, thus making it comprehensible against the background of the events and the problems which shaped it. As can be seen, this definition is more descriptive than systematic, but it should cover the substance of the problem. The task is much more complicated than it might appear at first glance, especially in the sphere of Semitic literature, as we shall see in the course of the discussion.
(c) So if there is not and never has been a period in which the reader of the Bible has not felt the need to gain information about the circumstances which accompanied and often conditioned the genesis of a particular text, whether it is read as sacred scripture or as literature, there is also a need to recognize that first the synagogue and then the Christian church down to the Renaissance were not very concerned to establish in an independent and original form the circumstances in which the sacred books originated (here we should leave on one side the Antiochene school and the figures of St Jerome and Nicolas of Lyra). The church usually contented itself with taking over the traditional opinions of the synagogue. Allegorical exegesis, soon practised on a large scale in the mediaeval church, avoided the problems by means of that very special form of a historical sublimation which is the nature of allegory; therefore the problem of the divergence between the present reality of the texts and their traditional interpretation did not arise until the beginning of the sixteenth century, with humanistic exegesis. That also happened because with the exceptions of St Jerome and later Nicolas of Lyra, mentioned above, Hebrew was virtually unknown in the West and the Bible was read in the Latin version. It was humanism, with its principle of a return to the sources, that was to be the foundation of scientific-critical Introduction, and the acceptance of this principle by the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century may be said to have constituted the decisive step in this direction in church circles also. Despite that, the first attempt at historical-critical Introduction did not take place, paradoxically, within Protestantism, if we leave aside the theses put forward at Wittenberg by Karlstadt in 1520 and rejected by Luther. Rather, it took place in Judaism in the person of the dissident Baruch de Spinoza (in his Tractatus theologico-politicus, Amsterdam 1670) and in the Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation with the work of the Oratorian Richard Simon (in his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, Paris 1678). The first modern Introductions came to birth with these works. But neither Judaism nor the Catholic Church of the time accepted their potentialities. Spinoza was anathematized, and Simon had to leave his order. It was only during the second half of the eighteenth century, i.e. in the developed Enlightenment, that Introduction succeeded in freeing itself from its dogmatic and ecclesiastical presuppositions and becoming an independent critical science.
(d) This connection with the Enlightenment and therefore with its rational approach to problems was then to prove, for more than a century, a burden on Introduction, both in respect of its freedom from presuppositions (the dogma of the synagogue or the church was in fact replaced very soon by the dominant philosophy of each era: idealism in its Kantian and Hegelian forms, evolutionism, historicism and so on) and in respect of its own relations to the synagogue and the Christian churches, for which it did the majority of its work in the sphere of the rabbinic seminaries and faculties of theology, which were in fact concerned with preparing ministers for the church and its worship. But in no way can it be said that Introduction suffered from the change, despite certain contingent difficulties; in the face of philosophical doctrines it was possible to engage in debate and even in polemic, but this was not so easy in the face of the doctrines of the church and the synagogue (as the two cases cited indicate). Moreover these philosophical theories did not necessarily have preconceived opinions on the origin and development of the biblical books. So it was possible to embark, at least in countries with a āProtestantā tradition, on a collaboration between the faculties of theology (almost always in universities) and those of literature; this collaboration was not always an easy one, but in the long run it was fruitful. Those divisions did not occur which we tend to find in Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox countries or even in wide areas of Judaism. At the same time, however, this collaboration led to a more or less open conflict between the faculties of theology and the churches who drew their ministers from them, a conflict which has still not completely been overcome.
(e) The new situation of freedom of research in which Introduction found itself coincided with the progressive rediscovery of the world of the ancient Near East. From Napoleonās expedition to Egypt and the discovery (1798) and decipherment of the Rosetta Stone, throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, discoveries were made of the world in which Israel had lived and in which its main figures had been active. Practices and customs; religious, political, legal and social institutions; peoples, places and indeed nations unknown or inadequately known beforehand and, even more important, the various languages and the texts composed in them began to take shape. The biblical narratives and poems, first read almost exclusively in the sphere of the synagogue and of the Christian churches, thus came to be restored to their natural environment, to their own basis, to their proper place in universal history, by the elimination of often fictitious and outdated content, interpretations and explanations created by the tradition of the synagogue and the church. Finally it was possible to study the biblical text on its own merits, without other interference.
(f) Those nowadays who want to devote themselves to the study of Introduction to the Hebrew Bible will soon find themselves confronted with a problem which much of the biblical literature has in common with the other literature of the Ancient Near East: the anonymity of the majority of the texts. It should be noted that in the ancient Near East we know only the signatories of letters and treaties, two literary genres which are rare in the Hebrew Bible. Another difficulty is presented by pseudepigraphy, i.e. the tendency to attribute a writing to a person with an acknowleged reputation. Moreover, there are often no objective elements for anything other than conjectural dating; chronology can therefore be arrived at only by subjective criteria, which, apart from being open to question, inevitably change over the generations, as various techniques are improved. There are cases in which particular interpretations of the biblical text are simply the product of exegetical fashions: at the beginning of the century we find the Babel-Bibel (Babylonia and the Bible) polemic between authors who wanted to derive the whole of Hebrew thought from Mesopotamia and more moderate authors. Later there was a tendency to give very late dates to the Psalms and the poetical compositions of the Hebrew Bible generally, dates not prior to the Maccabaean period (cf. below, 34.4), and also to those compositions which clearly presuppose the existence of the monarchy and which were then attributed to the Hasmonaean rulers. But there is another example in the opposite direction: the attempts made particularly between the 1930s and the 1960s by a group of American philologists and archaeologists to back-date particular compositions, especially poetry (sometimes to the pre-monarchical or even pre-Israelite period) on the basis of the presence, whether real or presumed, of Canaanite or generally archaic elements. This was done without reflecting that Israelites and Canaanites spoke basically the same language and lived side by side for more than a millennium, down to the Hellenistic and Roman period, so that the presence of Canaanite elements in a composition (even given that it can be demonstrated that these are what they are) proves nothing on the chronological level, at least not to anyone who is not content merely to paraphrase what Israel said about its own prehistory but tries to arrive at a critical opinion. Moreover poetry tends always to use a conservative language, more archaic than current written language, and there is no reason to suppose that things will have been otherwise in Israel. So much is that the case that archaic terms and expressions have been found in the work of Ben Sirach, at the beginning of the second century BCE (cf. below, 48.2).
These fashions may not lead anywhere, but they are often not superseded without having first done some damage. However, their frequency is not due just to the inadequacies of scholars; the lack of objective elements for dating, especially for texts which are considered archaic and for poetry in general, makes some contribution to the creation of a situation which is confused in any case. That explains the perplexity of some scholars (above, p.4) when faced with attempts to obtain any information which does not immediately pose problems.
(g) It is for this reason that, despite the attempt by A.Lods* (1950) to write a history of Hebrew and Jewish literature while aware of the problems that such an attempt involves, the writing of any such history on the model of histories of the classical and modern worlds proves impossible. That is also why I too prefer to go on using the now time-honoured term āIntroductionā. In fact the only Hebrew āliteratureā that we have is that selection of texts which has been handed down in the form of the ācanonā, with the sole exception of late pseudepigraphical material handed down in other languages, and the very sparse epigraphical material that has come down to us (cf. Appendices 1 and 2). Of course if by āhistory of literatureā we mean that of the various traditions, only partly oral and for the most part written, and the literary genres represented in them (cf. below, 6.3), then we are applying to the texts a method which is not alien to them but also valid for the other literature of the ancient Near East, instead of trying to force it into whole schemes and criteria drawn from classical and Western literature which are not applicable to the situation in the ancient Near East.
2. The scope and limits of Introduction
(a) The anonymity of large parts of the texts, the pseudepigraphy of so many others and the difficulty of dating the major part of the Hebrew Bible by objective criteria therefore means that the problems of Introduction are quite special and the analogies with Western literature few. So the scholar must seek comparative material in the ancient Near East; the classical schemes which are still dominant in the West will be of little use. But the situation of the biblical writings is also quite different from that of the ancient Near East. In this latter case we have epigraphical texts which have rarely been tampered with, discovered in archaeological excavations, the terminus ante quem of which is almost always clear; in the Bible, on the other hand, updatings and continual re-readings have distorted t...
